Staff Software Engineer, Data Governance & Foundations

Instacart is transforming the grocery industry, providing grocery delivery and personal shopping services. The Data Infrastructure organization builds and operates systems powering the company's data ecosystem, including a modern open data lakehouse on Apache Iceberg, a multi-engine compute platform, and self-serve tooling.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Data Governance and Foundations Team. You will serve as a senior technical leader owning the architecture and delivery of our open lakehouse foundation, governance and access patterns, and multi-engine compute strategy.

• Translate Instacart's data strategy into a multi-year architecture roadmap.
• Own the open lakehouse foundation: define and deliver unified table formats, storage governance, and a multi-engine compute portfolio.
• Drive real-time and streaming infrastructure for critical use cases (Ads, Fraud, ML).
• Pioneer AI-native data infrastructure engineering by applying LLM/AI tools to the platform lifecycle.
• Elevate engineering excellence: lead architecture reviews, mentor engineers, and communicate trade-offs.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating data infrastructure or distributed systems.
• Hands-on expertise with modern data lakehouse architectures and open table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi) and distributed query/compute engines (e.g., Trino, Spark, ClickHouse).
• Experience with event-driven and streaming infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
• Proven ownership of major platform transitions or migrations.
• Ability to build cost/benefit and TCO models.
• Preferred: experience with governance controls, FinOps, deep SQL proficiency, Python or Scala, orchestration (Airflow) and data transformation (dbt).

Base pay ranges from $221,000 to $279,500 USD depending on location, with eligibility for new hire equity grants and annual refresh grants.

Equity grants and other benefits as described in the company's benefits offerings.

Apply via the provided link.